Cultural Hauntings: Narrating Trauma in Contemporary Films about the Iraq War

• Main Author: Katalina Kopka
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece 2018-12-01
• Series: Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media
• Online Access: http://ejournals.lib.auth.gr/ExCentric/article/view/6734

Societies come to terms with the “unfinished business” of past wars through obsessive retellings of their traumatic histories (Bronfen 2012). Combat films therefore are a powerful cultural arena wherein collective memories are negotiated. While movies about twentieth-century wars have received much public attention as meaning-making cultural artefacts, Western academia has to date largely neglected films about a defining conflict of the twenty-first century: the Iraq War (2003-2011). This paper addresses how American and Iraqi films contribute to debates on war memory by depicting ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ as a harrowing and inconclusive conflict. Specifically, the article examines how Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) and Mohamed Al-Daradji’s Son of Babylon (Syn Babilonu, 2009) incorporate the rhythms of traumatic memory into their narrative fabric. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of hauntology, I argue that the central structuring device of repetition compulsion creates complex trauma palimpsests which present war as a never-ending and ever-returning experience. Ultimately, this study’s examination of the interdependencies between film narrative, trauma, human precariousness and empathy sheds a new light on Iraq’s and America’s intricately intertwined histories of violence.